The world’s greatest mobile app obsession will soon be available to waste your time IRL.
Do you consider yourself an Angry Birds expert? Have you wasted hours of your valuable time honing your 2D slingshot skills? If so, prepare for a reality check, because the board game version of Rovio’s runaway mobile app is much, much tougher to master IRL.
Angry Birds: Knock On Wood was unveiled yesterday on a sunny rooftop in Toronto’s King West neighbourhood (#KGW ), where a group of the city’s tech, lifestyle and pop culture bloggers (including local culture documentarian Rannie Turingan , blogger extraordinaire Casie Stewart , and yours truly) were invited to try their hand at the spring-loaded slingshot game. I’ll be the first to report that it’s much more challenging to destroy the plastic, green pig-infested structures in real life than on your iPhone.
Here’s an explanation of how the game works:
With over 12 million purchases on the App Store, Angry Birds is the greatest success of the mobile app era, it was only a matter of time before the game was re-imagined in the physical realm (other than this T-Mobile commercial , of course). The movement into board games also represents the next logical step in the brand’s now-shameless merchandising .
But how will its on-screen mega-popularity translate into a tangible experience aimed at the elementary school set? Will the kids still like it minus the automatic point calculator, cartoon explosions and funny sound effects? We’ll find out as soon as the game hits shelves. It was initially reported to be arriving in May, but it’s now been pushed back to “Coming Soon,” which means the original version will have to do for a little while longer.
